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Pain is a needle under his skin that begins at the center soles of his feet and slithers, diffusing yet disparate, up through his lungs and out his eyeballs.
He’s gone through torture before that makes him doubt that. What pain is, that is. Or what his life is, or his memory is, or if anything from his existence up to that point was even real or was simply a hallucination of broader, gentler pains than the insistent, crushing, brain-stewing pain he’s in now.
And the thing is, it’s never because of the effects of the drugs they thrust into that pouch of subcutaneous fat rolled between their fingers. That, he knows well. That, he has endured, the same way one tolerates the friend who sits at the lunch table and isn’t quite a friend but isn’t exactly a stranger, either, but opens their mouth and rattles on and on until one wishes they’d never said hello to begin with.
It’s the aloneness that jolts him awake in the midst of it all.
The cacophony of dozens of voices, and the fact that none of them comes close to any he knows. Much less to the one voice he’s yearning to hear.
No solace when he’s surrounded and the instruments are buzzing. No rest either when they’ve retired for the night and left him to the big guns: the torment of his thoughts.
He thinks about cream sodas and how he scoffed that those things are an abomination, putting carbonated fizz with milk in one bottle and calling that either cream or a soda. He remembers how he secretly had it on his bucket list anyway, and when Liam had found the list on his phone—see, he hadn’t been trying all that hard to hide it from Liam, anyway—he’d protested that he only wanted to try it to see how bad it could possibly taste. And Liam had laughed at him, laughed right in his face with his throat bobbing and his tongue doing that shake it does when he’s genuinely losing it, and he’d told him, Theo, you idiot, they just call it cream but it doesn’t have cream or milk in it at all.
Liam had said that was moving up to the top of their list of things to do as soon as school let out. What a mundane thought that was. School letting out, as if anything unholy in Beacon Hills ever let them rest just because the academic term was in full swing. No time to stop for a silly cream soda on a lull night after studying in the library, because what do you know, three seconds tick by and then there’s a dark fleet of cliché SUVs roaring around the corner and monsters jumping down from the back with their rifles cocked to round up the boy-shaped dog at the convenience store.
He wishes it could have gone down while he was doing something heroic. Throwing his body over Mason’s or Stiles’ to protect them from a spray of bullets. Barging into the hunters’ lair to seize critical artillery and cease their operations. Hell, disobeying Scott’s alpha red eyes and flinging himself in harm’s way to rescue a younger pack member from their rite-of-passage kidnapping.
No. Instead, he had to have been out on a stupid walk to get some stupid drinks and ice cream with the boy he’s stupidly in love with, and the bastards had to have seized their moment just when Liam was in the bathroom and he was left all alone on the sidewalk.
A pity he’d rather be taken alive than dead these days.
—
They come for him, because of course they do, holy angels of teenage vengeance who never know the meaning of subtlety. To the hunters, it’s a disconcerting explosion of noise from upstairs. For Theo, it’s the throb of his heart going wild in his chest as the scent of friends and fury and home and pack invades his lungs.
Ninety-three seconds until the door of his holding cell bursts open. Another two seconds for blood-spattered Converse to cross the room, skidding, and for hands so warm that they burn his skin to grapple upwards with the steel binds around his wrists.
His skin is wet. His face feels like it’s on fire, his eyeballs pulsing behind his lids as his head lolls forward. The solidity of a shoulder that smells like safe catches him as he tips forward. Shh, shh, shh, I got you, says the voice he’s conjured up in his mind by now to sound like the one he’s been craving for days. He must been in stage nine of the torture method if his mental barriers have already crumbled and hallucinated a scent and sound so lifelike for his fantasies.
Except then he doesn’t have time or headspace to consider whether this is a dream or the life he had previous to this is what was a lie, because his nostrils are assaulted with the acridness of gunpowder and wolfsbane and hatred, and he jerks his head up in time to see the broad body filling the doorway behind Liam and the muscled arms hefting the crossbow directly at Liam’s back.
He not so much springs forward as he tumbles out of Liam’s grip and shoves the other boy out of the way as the bolt releases from its cage. The hunter’s face contorts with determination. Theo blinks, breathes, and the bolt disappears. The next thing he knows, the shaft has sprouted again in his line of vision. He’s down on his knees with a crack before he can understand what has happened.
He lists to the side in an ignominious faint just as Malia comes roaring around the corner with her claws out and buries them in the fleshy side of the hunter’s gut while Liam’s arms come up under Theo’s armpits. He gurgles, speaks something that is lost on everybody. Then loses his grip on dreams or reality.
—
The bolt passed through his neck and just barely nicked his carotid artery. This much, Theo could tell upon waking. He didn’t need the good wolf doctor explaining the particulars to him. Nor did Liam, it seems, having binged enough silly yet occasionally accurate medical and firefighter shows to know that the explosion of hot blood from Theo’s throat was a sign of something critical being struck.
It tore through his larynx. That would explain why, when Theo sits himself up from the examination table and blinks his shivering eyes at the beaten-down faces of the pack around him in Deaton’s back office, he opens his mouth and nothing comes out.
It’ll take a while to stitch itself back together, says Deaton.
Just keep company with Liam as usual and he’ll talk your ear off enough to make you want to start talking again, is Scott’s helpful addition.
Liam gives a token frown at the accusation but, predictably, goes yammering on about all the faults he found with their rescue operation. It makes Theo want to smile. Maybe pet Liam a little on the top of his disheveled head, the same way he’d want to pet a puppy and deny all the while that it’s his.
“Trust me,” says Mason, taking on the role of two fully sarcastic humans in the room in Stiles’ absence, “we could all do with a little less talking from Theo.”
If he had his voice right now, Theo never would have even thanked them. Not in words, at least. Now he’s stuck with the ridiculous want in his broken vocal cords to say thank you, just to spite them, because that’s his favorite motivation for everything.
—
“I would’ve healed, you know,” Liam says on the ride home. Because he, too, is an idiot and he’s just as allergic to verbalizing gratitude.
No, you wouldn’t, Theo says. His half-hearted eyeroll probably communicates the gist of his message. Wolfsbane is deadly for him, fatal nearly upon impact for werewolves. He wonders why he’s in love with such a stupid, stupid boy.
“You really gotta get rid of that bad habit of trying to save me.” Liam sniffs. At least he didn’t argue about letting Theo take charge of the wheel. Would have made Theo feel like a proper nitwit, chin propped up by a stiff white bandage around his neck, and unable to even drive himself where he needs to go. So Theo just rolls his eyes again and keeps his thumbs tapping in feigned irritation on the leather surface as Liam yaps on.
“You keep racking up brownie points left and right, you’re not even leaving me a chance to keep up,” Liam complains. “At least try to stand back and let me do some rescuing from time to time, okay? Jesus. I was in the middle of getting you down from that torture trap-device-thingy and you just had to immediately one-up me.”
Theo can’t even imagine the depth of his horror if Liam hadn’t freed him from his shackles in time and all he could do was stand there, pinned against the metal railing, helpless as Liam’s own blood splattered across him from the crossbow bolt blossoming in the center of his chest instead. The fleeting image in his mind’s eye is enough to make bile bubble up on Theo’s tongue.
His throat spasms with the effort to keep everything down. It’s painful, but nothing physical can compare to the anguish he’s always denied he is capable of feeling somewhere inside him, just at the thought of Liam’s lake eyes never opening again.
The spice of Liam’s scent turns swiftly to something more like earth and rain as the boy swivels his head and catches sight of the state Theo is in. “Theo,” he says.
Theo grips the steering wheel like he grips death around its throat.
“Pull over,” Liam is saying. “Theo. Pull over.”
Something in Theo ingrained with the overarching need to follow commands hears the literal meaning of Liam’s words. His foot unglues itself from the gas pedal and his hands twitch on the steering wheel until they’re drifting to the side. When he brakes in the shoulder and makes no move to shift the gear into park, because his fingers are too wrapped in their sticky grip around the leather of the wheel, Liam uses his left hand to shift the gear for him.
“Hey. Hey, hey, hey—”
That’s the rustle of Liam leaning over the interminable space between them on the bench so his body is one broad line of heat and pressure against Theo’s side. With Liam’s right hand he covers the trembling mess of Theo’s on the steering wheel. Inch by inch, with patient breaths and seconds of waiting, the warmth of Liam’s palm coaxes Theo’s bones to unfurl and release their hold. The next moment, Liam’s left hand comes up behind Theo’s head and settles at his nape, fingers questing through the overgrown strands of his hair left unkempt by sweat and blood and terror. He places the heel of his hand there on the subtle pulse point beneath the skin of the back of Theo’s neck, and Liam breathes: “I’m here.”
His words puff out in a hot breath of air over the shell of Theo’s ear. Theo wants to say something, burns with the yearning for language that’s constricted not so much by his ruined vocal cords as it is by the fact that he never learned past the age of nine how to deal with these soft touches.
Liam then shifts so his forehead comes to rest against the skin of Theo’s temple. The slope of his nose juts against Theo’s cheek, and his open mouth inhales and exhales in the corner of Theo’s neck, scenting and exuding comfort. Infinitesimally, he increases the pressure of his hand around Theo’s fingers, until Theo completely surrenders and lets his shaking hands fall toward the safety of the other boy’s lap.
“I’m here,” Liam whispers again. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here sooner.”
Part one of their fucked up thank you ritual.
“I’m glad you’re alive. I’m so, so glad.”
Part two, which trades brutal honesty with a gentler one. Because sometimes, I’m so glad can almost substitute for I’m so grateful.
And finally, part three: the dreaded promise.
“I’m here. I’ll always be here. You can count on it.”
Theo seals the pain in his gut of accepting Liam’s unfathomable grace with a wet sting in his eyes. Liam seals his end of the deal with a hot press of his lips, dry and chapped and imperfect as only he can be, against the crest of Theo’s cheekbone.